I recommend everyone play Shadows of the Damned at least once. It should be an initiation into video games. No, not because it’s good. Because its absurd, crass, raunchy, trash humor will determine whether or not you need to remove a stick from your ass. Seriously, I would make any new person I met play this game while I examined their facial expressions. Just to decide whether or not we could be friends.
Shadows of the Damned was a collaboration between Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami, and was one of Mikami’s first major titles after splitting from Capcom. If Shinji Mikami’s name is not familiar to you, sorry, we can’t be friends. If it is, then you’ll know him as the father of Resident Evil, and thus “survival horror.” Yes, I know Alone in the Dark technically invented survival horror, but nobody gave a shit until RE came along. With Capcom, he created all the classic RE games we know and love, and after he left, we got RE5 and RE6. While Capcom eventually righted the boat and kept it from capsizing, Mikami’s absence was definitely felt.
In the meantime, he and Suda 51 were making the spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4, called Shadows of the Damned. The reason I call it a spirit successor is because it used much of the same control schemes as RE4, only with all of the batshit craziness that Suda 51 brings to the table.
The result was a weird, raunchy game equivalent to one long dick joke. There are dick jokes on top of dick jokes. Most of them are awful. And I loved it.
Which is what brings me to the part about us being friends. While I certainly don’t require a game to be filthy and vulgar in order to enjoy it, I can certainly appreciate it when someone takes the time to make one that has all the class of a Roger Corman film. Wait, you don’t know who Roger Corman is, either? Man, you and I… I just don’t see this working out.
One of the great things about this game is that it exists without either political or social commentary. It didn’t have any counter-point to it’s objectification or sexual innuendo. A game nowadays might have a joke thrown in, but it will almost certainly have a character present to quickly point out how wrong that joke is. Shadows of the Damned makes no apologies, and I love it for that. Not only is there a part of the game where Garcia Fucking Hotspur (yep, that’s his name) turns his HotBoner (that’s his gun) to his crotch and makes it longer, but it follows a trip through a seedy part of Hell that’s basically whatever circle of Hell consists of boobs.
He travels through portals that consist of a giant version of his dead girlfriend (whom he’s trying to save) lapdancing topless. Lesser humans would try to keep their eyes straight and not admit that they want to look at giant video game titties, but the game literally forces you to not only look at the giant titties, but the path takes you across her stomach and right in between her giant video game titties. Also, if the word titties makes you uncomfortable, we can’t be friends.
Oh yeah, it makes you walk across her ass, too. And if you think that the developers just decided to put her in lingerie for the hell of it, you’re wrong. No, she’s in lingerie the entire game. If there was ever a game that said “fuck the prudes,” this is it. It’s bold and unapologetic and I give it props for that.
The actual gameplay is meh, but I’ll be completely honest with you; I played this game on Easy (a.k.a. “Lemon Hunter”) mode, and so should you. This is not a game to be played for its challenge. With the exception of a few chapters where the gameplay mixes up a bit, it’s pretty vanilla shooting and dodging. The aiming mechanic is ripped straight from Resident Evil 4, and lining up that laser dot on moving targets sucks just as much as it ever did.
I only have two main complaints with the game, and neither of them are its humor or subject matter. The first is that towards the end of the game, it starts to pad itself a bit. There is one particular stage in the catacombs where there’s a lot of running back and forth hitting “switches” and unlocking gates. By this point in the game, you’ve been doing this for quite a while, so it becomes a tedious affair that doesn’t really add anything to the game other than the play time.
The second, and this is a big one, is that the last few boss battles really suck. The battle with the opera singer is super-disappointing, since you’ve been seeing this woman repeatedly throughout the game and are really looking forward to blasting her, the developers made an artistic decision that honestly, kinda robs you of the satisfaction. It’s still a boss battle, but very unfulfilling. The real kick in the nuts is the battle with Flemming. He’s the main bad guy, and he’s a major pain in the ass, even on Easy. The reason is that he has a pattern that’s easily recognizeable, but actually doing the thing you need to do requires quick timing in a very small window. I’ve already mentioned how the aiming sucks ass. If you miss that window you have to go through his pattern all over again. My fight with him took about a half an hour. That’s 30 minutes without dying. If I would’ve died, that would’ve been even longer. It was a ridiculously stupid fight that really tarnished an otherwise decent gaming experience. Do yourself a favor and don’t waste your time on this motherfucker on any other difficulty. You won’t gain anything from it except maybe an achievement and a few broken controllers.
I really enjoyed about 90% of the game. Shadows of the Damned should be played to remind yourself that you’re human and you’re allowed to enjoy things. In a world that’s getting more and more sanitized and wrapped in political and social agendas, it’s nice to experience something that just wants to be ridiculous and trashy and fuck you if you don’t like it. It got average reviews when it came out almost a decade ago, but the landscape has changed so much in the past few years, I can’t help but wonder how it would’ve fared had it released today.
For now though, at least we can appreciate that it exists, especially since mainstream media and developers will likely never makes something like it again.
